Data to test RICT Model 44

This project was commissioned by the Environment Agency (EA) Ecology & Ecosystems team, part of the Agriculture Fisheries and Natural Resources department (Environment & Business Directorate, Head Office), with support from the EA Water Resources. The Ecology & Ecosystems team is in charge of EA standard invertebrate methods for assessing rivers, including river status classification, and of developing the River Invertebrate Classification Tool (RICT). RICT has at its core the River Invertebrate Prediction and Classification System (RIVPACS) model. This model has been upgraded and refined through years, with Model 44 being the latest experimental working version. Model 44 has been designed to provide more accurate predictions of invertebrate communities in rivers impacted by hydro-morphological alterations. In particular, the new input variables exclude width, depth and substrate, and are hydro-morphologically independent. In 2017, UKCEH created a UK-wide database for these new Model 44 variables (Kral et al., 2017). The aim of this project is to generate a testing dataset including a sufficient number of sites across England, and their Model 1 and Model 44 input variables so the original and new models can be compared, and should they yield different results, to assess if Model 44 is better suited for water resource assessments, and can better capture impact of flow and fine sediment pressures.